(Corrects spelling of Lambda throughout)
By Stephen Nellis
SAN FRANCISCO, May 20 (Reuters) - Artificial intelligence cloud computing startup Lambda on Wednesday said it has won a cloud contract with high-speed trading firm Hudson River Trading.
Lambda, which is backed by Nvidia and raised $1.5 billion last year after signing a deal to provide Microsoft with access to Nvidia's chips, said the deal with Hudson River Trading will entail renting more than 1,000 of Nvidia's latest "Blackwell" systems to the trading
firm, which Reuters last month reported had $12.3 billion in trading revenue last year.
Lambda and Hudson River Trading did not disclose the financial terms of the deal. Stephen Balaban, co-founder and chief technology officer at Lambda, said the deal involved Nvidia systems that Lambda has already purchased and installed in a data center, rather than a new purchase of chips.
Hudson River Trading is a major customer for Alphabet's Google Cloud, but has only announced use of Nvidia's chips in Google's cloud, rather than Google's own custom AI chips. Balaban said the ubiquity of Nvidia's AI chips has become one of their strongest selling points to large customers like Hudson River Trading.
"It's the only product that's available in every one of the major cloud providers," Balaban told Reuters.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Stephen Coates)
